Archive for the 'Analysis and Opinion' Category

Image: Paolo Uccello’s 15th century 24 hour clock at the Florence cathedral. If you are a knowledge worker, you are most likely used to working fifty, sixty, even seventy hours a week. The higher numbers are standard in hi-tech culture, as seen for example in Silicon Valley. This fact has important ramifications that I explore in this post. The cold equations The basic equation governing our lifetime allocation is the following: Daily hours = Work hours + Life hours + Maintenance hours Where Life = family time, leisure, hobbies, reading, rest, etc. Maintenance = eating, sleeping, personal care, etc. And.. Read more

An interesting audience question I had just finished delivering my lecture on Information Overload at a hi-tech company and was taking comments from the usual group of attendees that approach me after everyone else has left – these are usually the best comments, since they come from people interested enough to stay and wait their turn. And this time I had a surprise. A man asked me whether I give such lectures in schools, targeting kids in their mid to late teens. These are the members of Generation Z (what will we do next, one wonders, now that we’ve run.. Read more

In October I gave an invited keynote lecture at the XV International Conference on University Libraries at UNAM, the national university of Mexico. The conference theme was how libraries can face the challenges of the coming years, when infinite knowledge is available to anyone at the swipe of a smartphone screen, and continue to provide value to their users and to society; my keynote was to address the phenomenon of information overload and its repercussions for both libraries and users. This gave me an opportunity to combine two fascinating domains: my core field of Information Overload, and the evolution of.. Read more

Dinotopia is one of the lovelier literary utopias out there. Introduced as a lavishly illustrated book by James Gurney, and later made into a TV miniseries, it tells of a fictional island where intelligent dinosaurs and humans coexist and collaborate in a peaceful society; the absurdity of the premise is offset by Gurney’s magnificent illustrations. And although this blog seldom deals with dinosaurs, real or fictional, there is a point in the book that is relevant here. The code of Dinotopia The citizens of Dinotopia obey the ancient “Code of Dinotopia”, which consists of 11 short commandments, such as “Give.. Read more

Do you remember Deming? Heck, do you even know who Deming was? W. Edwards Deming (1900 – 1993) did not found any Start-ups, head any corporations, or promote visions of a greener Earth. Why should you know of him? And yet he had a profound influence on our world, and his thinking changed the fate of entire industries. What’s more, he was a man of piercing understanding and wisdom, and he created a management philosophy deserving our admiration. He was unknown in his native USA for most of his life, and now is sliding back into oblivion. I, however, remember.. Read more

Five and a half years ago I blogged about how Volkswagen decided to turn off its Blackberry servers outside of work hours, thereby affording employees some quality time with their families and their lives. It was a pioneering move and a courageous one, and I added my hope that other companies would take note. It took a while, but now companies and legislators are not merely taking note – they’re taking action. In fact some of them are not only enabling, but also enforcing a barrier between Work and Life that email may not penetrate. There is much more to.. Read more

I was invited to give a Webinar for an IBM group interested in Information Overload and how to solve it. I shared with the group my take on the evolution of solutions to this problem from the mid-90s to the present – and the likely future. Here is the video, shared with permission.

Fathers and Sons I was talking to a veteran manager and he told me an anecdote that caught my interest. This man had a son that had a room in the upstairs floor of the family house. One day the son told him he was sending him a web link of interest; the link failed to arrive. The father asked for a resend, which the son promptly effected; yet still no link was received. Finally my friend asked what email address the kid was sending it to – and the son, surprised, said “Skype!”… A growing communication gap What was.. Read more

Letters from the past One fine day in the 20th century BCE Ilabrat-bani, an Assyrian merchant from Kültepe in Anatolia, wrote to one Amur-ili a letter concerning shipments of textiles, and providing advice for travel. The letter, written in cuneiform on a clay tablet, survived to reach present day historians and inform their research. On June 8th of 1511 Piero Venier, a merchant living in Sicily, penned a letter to his sisters in Venice. It contained his observations from an Auto de Fe he’d witnessed in Palermo, where the Spanish Inquisition burned at the stake conversos suspected of heresy amid.. Read more

Guest post by Toby Ruckert (Twitter / LinkedIn) Originally published on my blog. I’ve been self-employed essentially my whole life, and this year marks the 25th anniversary since starting my entrepreneurial journey in 1992. Being an entrepreneur naturally comes with a lifestyle that makes it hard to draw the line between work and life. Discussions about work-life balance simply aren’t very productive when your business is (such a big part of) your life, especially when you’re the one who started it. And while many told me that we should separate life from work to be happy, I don’t believe in.. Read more